Chapter 290: Of Great Delicacy

James put the sweet in his mouth while courtesans and a chef watched him with grave attention usually reserved for a convict on trial.

It was a small, round kiss of toasted coconut, glazed with cane syrup and pressed with a single clove. The glaze cracked against his teeth, the coconut yielded warm and soft, and the clove carried a hint of orange blossom with it.

James stopped chewing and closed his eyes.

"Enzo, mate..."

He let a breath wheeze through his nose, then his eyes opened. "That’s the best bloody thing I ate this whole blessed day, and I’ll have you know, there’s some mighty fish back home."

The women shrieked with delight.

Enzo slapped both hands to his chest and swayed on his heels, his eyes swimming with emotion, the cold pipe bobbing between his teeth. "Baci di monaca, Capitano! The kisses of the nun! Ah, Dio mio, you taste the heaven! Is not the sugar, is not the clove, no, no!"

His voice cracked.

"The secret, Capitano... the secret, it is everything!"

Then he let his voice climb, note by trembling note. "First, the coconut! Grated by hand, Capitano, then she sleeps, la poverina, she sleeps in the syrup one whole night, like a bride, all trembling, all sweet, and in the dawn you wake her with the clove, gently, gently, gentle like you pet a slumbering cat. And then the oven! Hot like a Spaniard’s temper, kind like a Neapolitan grandmother! And then... and then, Capitano..."

Some brown-curled courtesan, who had been steadily eating through the tray, cut across him with her cheek bulging like a squirrel. She swallowed, licked syrup off her thumb, and shot him a long-suffering look.

"Then we eat it, love, Gawd’s sake, we asked for a sweet, not some christenin’."

Enzo clutched his waistcoat as though she’d stabbed him, while James laughed hard enough to shake the awning post.

He wiped his lips with a knuckle and leaned his shoulder against the post.

"Right, then. A matter of great delicacy, you say."

He glanced at the women, then back at the chef, cocking an eyebrow. "Well, here I am, and here’s the delicacy, and I’m bracin’ myself like a mast in a gale. So out with it, mate, afore I lose me nerve."

Enzo drew the pipe from his teeth and laid it over his heart. He closed his eyes, breathed in, and let the silence stretch until it creaked.

"Capitano... I wish... to open... a pasticceria."

James waited for the rest of the proposal.

Not to disappoint, the words started to pour out immediately. "A pastry-cook’s shop, Capitano! With a beautifully polished counter, an oven, big, big, big, and a copper pan, Capitano, big enough to bathe a bishop, and his mistress, and his dog!"

He stabbed a finger at the sky, and the pipe swung wildly with it. "And the cooks, the young cooks, I teach them everything, so it runs without me. Because my kitchen, she is the Rose’s, and when the Rose sails..."

His voice dropped to a vow.

"Enzo sails. Always, yntil the sea itself eats me."

He paused long enough for the grand ambition to meet the practical difficulty.

"The trouble..."

He turned his hands palm up, empty.

"The trouble is only the money."

"Och, only the money, is it?"

Enzo clutched his own waistcoat as if his heart had been cut out. "My Havana share, Capitano, every shilling, every last one, I spend on the sacks! Cinnamon from a Dutchman who swear on his mother’s grave it is Ceylon! Cloves! Mace! Saffron! Vanilla from a Spaniard who wept when he sold it, Capitano, he wept like I stole his child!"

He flung out his purse and shook it, only for nothing to fell out but a gray tuft of lint, which drifted to the cobbles. "And now, Madonna mia, I have four sacks of cinnamon under my hammock, and a purse full of lint!"

James began to laugh, low and helpless. "For days I’ve been wonderin’ why the Rose smells like a bloody Sunday dinner, and not a crumb on the table to show for it."

Enzo drew himself up to his full, modest height and folded his arms.

"I need a patron, Capitano. A padrone! A benefactor! A saint with a purse!"

He spread his hands to the heavens. "In every tavern, in every port, they say it, ’Capitano Calloway, he is rich like a Spanish viceroy!’ Rich like the Spanish king himself!"

The brown-curled courtesan shot her hand up. "Oh, I’ll mind the funds, love! Who better? I’ve counted shillings for a livin’ these ten year, an’ there’s not a man alive can short me by a ha’penny."

The dry courtesan examined her nails languidly.

"I’ll taste every batch, as one got to be thorough."

She buffed a thumb on her sleeve.

"God knows it won’t be Enzo. He’d eat the profit."

The small pink courtesan clapped both hands over her mouth, her eyes going round and shiny as new shillings, and the words came muffled and reverent through her fingers.

"A shop... a real shop, wi’ a window... an’ a wee bell on the door, mebbe?"

James laughed outright. All things considered, he was relieved that the matter of great delicacy had turned out to involve sugar.

"Imagine it, Capitano! Imagine!"

Enzo began building the shop with wild gestures, putting a window here and a swinging sign there, the imaginary sign swinging merrily without so much as a breath of wind.

The words came out excitedly. "The Rose of Concordia, in gold! And in the glass, Capitano, the Rose in spun sugar, every gun, every sail, every little rope, so fine you weep to eat her! Sweets named for captains! The Calloway kiss, bitter on the outside, and inside nothing but trouble!"

He whirled, drunk on his own vision, arms flung toward the horizon. "And the sugar ships sail! To Port Royal! To Havana! To Cartagena! And the King of Spain, he strikes his colors to a marzipan galleon, and we conquer the whole sea, Capitano, with no blood! Not one drop!"

The dry one tilted her head.

"A little blood, just a drop. For flavor."

James let Enzo’s vision carry on without him, his attention wandering up the streets to the Assembly Hall, where sunlight flashed off the windows.

He was rich, though he could not have said how much.

Spanish silver, jade masks and golden idols from a flooded tomb, indigo, quicksilver, a share of Esperanza’s cargoes. Some of it was weighed in ounces, some in barrels, and some simply floated.

Most of the wealth he could measure was invested into the town. The stone of the pier, the roof of the schoolhouse, the glass in the very hall he was looking at, all recorded as gifts to the common coffers in neat handwriting.

If Concordia stood on his silver by right, it was a lordship pretending to be a free city, but if it stood on his silver by gift, it remained free.

That suited a small town well enough, but it would become a problem the day the town no longer needed him, because a free city ought not to depend on some captain’s purse to keep breathing, and the assembly, sooner or later, would have to...

"Capitano? Capitano!"

Enzo had seized his hands and dropped to his knees on the cobbles, eyes wet and hopeful.

The courtesans, their bodices laced loose, surrounded him like a warm tide.

The brown-curled woman caught him by the neck and leaned in with all the familiarity of an old sweetheart, her ample bosom against his chest as she pleaded the case straight into his ear. The pink one seized his arm and hugged it into the warmness of her curves, looking up at him with enormous, hopeful eyes, while the dry one lay against his other side, her bare shoulder brushing his sleeve as she inspected him with a knowing smile.

James clicked his tongue, presumably to remind them that he hadn’t agreed, only for some courtesan to slip up behind him and drape herself over his shoulders, her voluptuous breasts pressed against his back, while her chin found a comfortable perch near his shoulder, and a playful nudge sent his hat slipping down over his eyebrows.

"Go on, love, say yes! Look at the poor lamb!"

"Please, Chairman, I’ll mind the till for nothin’!"

"Yes, yes, say yes..."

"Capitano mio, I beg, for the sweets, for the ladies, for the little oven with no home..."

"Say YES!"

The brown-curled woman bounced on her toes to make certain it was understood, and her ridiculous chest swung straight into Enzo’s face with a fat smack.

Enzo slid down with his eyes wide and a slow, beatific smile spreading across his face.

"Madonna, what a way to die. Tell my mother... tell her I die happy."

James shoved his hat back up out of his eyes, wheezing with laughter.

"Aye, aye, enough! Enough, the lot of you!"

He bent, took Enzo by the waistcoat, and heaved. "Up with you, daft Italian, afore you die of joy on me boots! It’s done, d’ye hear? I’ll stake the shop."

The courtesans hugged each other and cheered wildly, while the chef burst into tears and kissed his own tray.

James dangled the sobbing cook upright and gave him a brisk shake to settle him. "Send the plan and the bill to the estate. In ink, mind, and not with a thumb dipped in treacle, if you can read and write."

"If I can read!"

Enzo wrenched himself free. "Capitano, per l’amor di Dio! I read the receipts of a duke’s kitchen in three tongues! French! Latin!"

He faltered one fraction of a second, then raised his chin and his voice together. "And... and Neapolitan, which is a tongue! Is a very good tongue! Is the tongue of angels and thieves!"

James grinned. "Aye, right, send the papers for the whole lot, then. For the ward where the shop’s to stand, the petition, the boundary walked with your neighbors, the clerks stamp. Every last one, mind."

"Papers!"

Enzo staggered as if shot through the heart, one hand clapped to his brow, the other groping for a chair that wasn’t there. "Papers! Petitions! Stamps! Capitano, I came to Concordia to be free! Free, like the bird, like the wine! Not to be a number in a clerk’s little book!"

"Och, you’re free as a gull, lad, free as the wind."

Concordia had taken to paperwork ever since the night every soul in town had been logged before dawn, and its clerks had shown no signs of giving up the habit.

Enzo received this news like hearing his sentence, then recovered himself and swept a bow that nearly brought the awning down.

"For the pasticceria!"

His voice rang off the cobbles. "For the ladies! For the glorious, the immortal, the eternal, sugar! Sugar, Capitano, who conquers kings, who conquers cardinals, who conquers even Scotsmen!"

The women descended on the tray, and James tipped his hat to the whole sticky lot of them.

These days had been easy ones, with fish, sweetmeats, and a town that seemed quite capable of running itself. He licked the last of the clove from his thumb, and a small thought he hadn’t invited appeared on the back his mind, how no sea stayed this calm for long.